technonaturalist

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn’t make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I’m going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes).

We didn’t do much. There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes. 13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something. I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they’re getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff. He and his siblings however had due to the style of homeschooling we do, almost all the time in the world to do as they liked, and if he felt that bedtime or something else was cramping his style then he could simply bring it up and we could have a chat about it and either tell him why it had to be that way whether he liked it or not, or negotiate conditions that would work better for everyone. He agreed that it might be better to do that instead. The bigs wanted to decide their own bedtime and are doing so at a reasonable hour (though every now and again I have to poke them before I go to bed).

Blender’s viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy. This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be. I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn’t remove the need for the actual model to work. Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful. I’m not waiting around for it, I’ll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps. The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it’s not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

Add the hair in the usual fashion.

By default the hair will just sprout wherever. To restrict it to a certain part of the mesh, create a vertex group in vertex paint mode, and then use the group you created as a density map (found at the bottom of the particle panel).

I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck.

So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.

• while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored
• I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair

I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work. Wasn’t the biggest leap to find out about curve guides, and then took me the better part of forever to work out that curve guides had to be on the same layer as the particle emitter to work. Once that was sorted out, I then spent way too long playing around with the different curve types to work out which one would be the best for the job. Seems that nurbs animates quickest so that’s what I’m using.

March kicked off with Perth’s first steemup. The kids got to have some interesting conversations with new friends and encouraged to continue blogging (except for 9yo who disappeared off to the pool for most of the thing).

The steem colours I sported in my mohawk so everyone knew where to go are still in!

The month kicked off with 9yo deciding to make his own “card game” after ages of playing Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. After quick playtests with me and 11yo, 11yo decided to help make even more “cards”. I use the term loosely bcause the “cards” were all A4-sized.

The game was fairly simple and entertaining, and after playing a couple of times 9yo decided that he probably needed more “good” cards as it didn’t take very long for me to die despite the lives and death prevention things that had been added in the iteration with 11yo.

Last week was working on pants and boots (and getting to use some fabric normals and a leather material some kind souls made available on Blendswap):

trying to wrangle the hair into several hair ties (it was supposed to be tied with a cord but I finally got it through my thick skull that it wouldn’t stay, even when I did have long hair I didn’t do anything interesting with it, so I’m going to claim total stupidity ignorance and too much anime on my part there!):

Currently all about hair and pants.

I did the pants first to procrastinate the hair.

They do actually have a pattern but I turned down the lights so the skin wouldn’t be so overblown, so it’s something that will be noticed in bright light. Otherwise they look like…black pants. I was thinking of using velcro for the trail strap but may end up just making it an elastic loop as maybe in the future there will be little nano thingies in the clothes that automatically repair fraying clothing so the elastic doesn’t give out.